


Completing the puzzle

by Radiolaria



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen, Introspection, Not Beta Read, Post Episode: s07e14 The Name of the Doctor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-24
Updated: 2013-05-24
Packaged: 2017-12-12 21:27:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/816234
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Radiolaria/pseuds/Radiolaria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A puzzle is an image cut in pieces.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Completing the puzzle

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: Post-The Name of the Doctor, the story of the Impossible Girl is done, and Clara pieces herself back together. For the [Remember me - fanworkathon.](http://clara-who.livejournal.com/20313.html)
> 
> A tad harsh for the Doctor but the writing occured just after a TGWW/TGC rewatch.

She bakes and works, and dreams and feeds, and laughs and travels. But not quite. Numbness has a hold on her heart. And not a feeling passes here.

There is the pointlessness of it all. She feels little and scared and cold for a while. She’s nothing really.

_How many times have you saved me, Clara?_

_I didn’t. It wasn’t me. All those times. It wasn’t me._

Even after he hugged her, and took her in his arms, and brought her back home.

Just like he did when he met her the first time -except it really wasn’t. Tucked her into bed, prepared a light snack on her nightstand, watched over her. She even feels, far away, from the edge of sleep and oblivion and exhaustion, the brush of a kiss on her forehead.

Did he similarly act with all the others?

He is not doing it on purpose. Not really. Otherwise it would have been so inhumane of him. _Wouldn’t it?_

Except he is not human, she has to remind herself.

He seems so happy she was, after all, his Impossible Girl.

His Clara who keeps dying.

The words escaped him at some point and she furiously blushed; _the woman twice dead_ , he called her. A woman. What she could be. What she’ll never be. Surely he can’t be that happy that a version of herself died for him. And she doesn’t know her. In the end he will be left with all this brilliant, passionate, consummate -that’s the word, considering each time she will die- story with her. She will have Clara’s life and nothing more. Because she is just Clara.

_Just Clara?_

It slips from time to time. From her. Moments when she feels it; not complete, not anymore. Although his gaze on her is telling her the contrary.

His old eyes she can decipher now -only because she is not afraid of looking- and read. She is completed, his Clara, his Impossible Girl. The mystery has been disclosed; he knows who she is and all those times when he did not. And it makes her shiver.

Because she does not feel complete.

How could she?

The Doctor thought it was so simple; step into his timeline, call her name, pick her up. So simple. And the voices and the faces were swirling around, sometimes her face -but not hers- he was running towards. The faces were passing, time was howling around, panic building inside. Their eyes were not seeing her. She was dead to that man with the white hair, to that man with the umbrella, and that man and that man. But not her, never her. What she witnessed on those faces for a split second was the cruel, selfish, necessary speed of light mourning for a girl he barely noticed while she was saving his life. Except that girl wasn’t even her. 

At the eye of the storm, she curled up on herself, trying to preserve what was still her in that whirlwind of strange faces and thoughts, of lives and deaths, old men and impossible girls.

He thought she was them. In the Asylum. In Victorian London.

But Clara was not among them.

_I don’t know where I am._

And the Doctor came down from the void, when there was nothing left from her, but his unseeing faces, time folding, her alone.

What did he pick up?

_It’s like I’m breaking into a million pieces._

A leaf. Yet not a leaf, not complete anymore. Only the veins remain, the flesh had gone. The most exquisite structure, the most breakable also.

So fragile she is. And now he is going to slide her between the pages of a book -book of his life she will never read-, to preserve her. No blowing for her. Not anymore. She is his. Companion now. Travelling assistant. Like others. So many others.

There was a time when she was all that and more, the time when her impossibility withheld all the possible. Little Clara and her one hundred and one places to see were a reality, a sketch of the one hundred and one persons she was going to be, the one hundred and one places she was going to live in, the one hundred and one lives she was going to live, and more. To save the Doctor.

She did not know it at the time. It still stings.

He drops her back home and she knows it will be the last time he does so before a while. Home can never be where she lived again. The only way she could carry on would be between the pages of his book.

Assimilated.

Never had she wanted to be moulded that way by him -to protect, love, impress. Not be changed. Because he’s alien and that’s something she would never accept to become.

She’s human.

So she watches herself.

In her, every crack and hole is a cavity large enough to possess a resonance property, like a tiny sound box, and the sum of all those fractional echoes brazes her mind to unrest.

Insomnia was waiting for her in those first days after Trenzalore. Still the beast did not attack. Sleep was a grey death, where she would feel the slight brush of a breath not hers against her thoughts. Ghost of a thought really.

Sometimes she would catch a glimpse of a little girl, big brown eyes and long hair, freckles and sadness beyond her years.

Sometimes she would see worlds tumble down and galaxies disappear, stars burn and revolutions break out, and museums. The museums are really an odd part of her new dreams. She doesn’t fight, they bring her peace.

Angie and Artie are there. Never has she felt more grateful for their infinite childish selfishness, ridicule fights and gratuitous acts keeping her mind busy. To busy her mind. That is not something she would have needed to do before. Little holes to fill, everywhere.

Like questions. Except not.

No more mysteries. And it comforts her. Because it came back to her, things she saw, things he did. To preserve… what? His secrets, his mistrust, his love. Because he did mistrust her and loved her. Right from the beginning.

_Doctor, why?_

He does not answer. Not in Yorkshire 1893, not in Caliburn House 1974, not in the never-ever time of the TARDIS.

Probably never will.

_So, little Clara, the Impossible Girl you’re not anymore. You’re left-over._

It’s quite straining. She cannot feel the parts of her that went missing, although she can tell which parts left. A bit there and there. That particular manic bit of flirt she had -still has, but not quite-, that certain squint of the eye, that joy in the handshake. She cannot remember how it was before.

There is a chance it was not that different. She changed and the cold eye she casts on herself cannot sustain the stretch.

It gangs up on her while awake, images she caught in his memories, a mop, beauteous crimson skies, a jelly baby and gardens of paradise, and the moment after a chunk of words that are not hers in her mouth, a boldness in her walk, a brazen smile. Most unsettling are those bits coming from nowhere, not from him, but from death. That’s what it feels like. His memories have an after-taste of never-were. The thought and gestures she cannot repress feel like death. She suspects they are all that is left from the passing in her mind of that woman, that truly impossible woman who was dead but not dead.

Her skin slips from her, as if boiled.

Her mind expands to serpentine maps.

There is a ghost in her bed each night, and waiting between her breaths.

Strong and bold and intricate and empowered.

Wise and ancient. In love.

The traces of a dead woman and the remains of an impossible girl.

Their fabric merging. It feels as if she is in her mother’s embrace. Tender and protective and dead.

She hates him for that.

Uneasy in her new skin, she would cut it, but revels in River. When the strangeness of her pulls too much, she panics and falls for a while in a pattern of caricatures of herself. And re-enacts her life, its stage, its mourning, its mistakes. Overdoes her smiles and seasonings.

Artie mocks her, Angie is impressed.

The Doctor is still not back. Waiting for her to process. Or hiding. She has a feeling travelling with him doesn’t always end well.

She misses him.

One morning she is baking a Soufflé, for the umpteenth time dismally eyeing the mixture about to become a failure. Angie is leaned over a book, earphones and focused pout in place; Artie seems to be probing his copybook with the pen rather than doing his homework. All is still. A burst of wind sprays the window with rain, a car begrudgingly starts outside, the machines in the kitchen gently whir, her ghost hovers about.

“Maybe, you are just growing up.”

Clara starts at Angie’s words. The teenager didn’t look up from her book, earphones down.

“You changed. But it’s fine, you are just growing older. You don’t have to like what you are becoming. Says Nina. Always space for improvement. “

It is the sixth morning after Trenzalore.


End file.
